Transylvanian Folksongs

In the early 1900s Béla Bartók was introduced to the folk music of the Romanian people in Transylvania. His immediate infatuation with the music led him to a lifelong pursuit to record and catalog these beautiful regional pieces. Bartók spent eight years traveling the Romanian countryside recording and transcribing these pieces, which he would spend the rest of his life collating into six catalogs containing over three thousand tunes, simply entitled Romanian Folk Music. The composer's own compositions would be influenced at every level by his folk studies. Lucian Ban grew up along Bartók's collecting path in Transylvania and by the end of the '90s he would leave Romania to pursue his career in jazz music in New York City.